Slashdot Mirror
True Names
The history of this book is a little odd. It was supposed to be published several years ago, and was delayed for some reason, unknown to me. As a result, only the introduction to the book has been written recently - even the pieces that were intended to be extremely current are now rather painfully dated.
There's an old interview with Vinge where the interviewer draws out a number of Vinge's ideas about the modern internet and the Singularity. Vinge seems to have had it in hand when writing his introduction to True Names, and you can probably got a good idea of what he tried to convey in the anthology by reading the interview. If it sounds at all interesting, read on.
Vinge's central point is that cyberspace is extremely controllable, if and only if everyone's true names are known. That's the point brought out in the essay True Names, and it's a point that the other writers featured in the anthology agree upon. It's an incredibly insightful idea, one well worth spending some time pondering.
Let's look at some of the larger pieces included in the book. Timothy May, who is perhaps best known for his ranting posts about crypto anarchy, has a lengthy and astonishingly well-written essay titled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy". The essay reads as if an editor with a firm hand extracted most of May's characteristic wild-eyed prose and yet kept the insightful ideas behind it - if only all of his writing was like this essay. It's a great introduction to what May means by "crypto anarchy". May is one of the most optimistic writers in the book, and he, as well as the other writers, believe that we are at a fork: either we'll move toward a surveillance state, or toward what May calls an anarcho-capitalist state, but the middle ground is unstable - we'll end up at one extreme or the other. May believes we're already firmly on the road toward anarcho-crypto-utopia.
John M. Ford, who you may recognize as a science fiction writer, has a short story wondering what the machines will think of us.
Alex Wexelblat, computer scientist, has a powerful essay looking at the internet as a tool for surveillance and control. Written only a few years ago, many of his predictions are now fact.
Richard Stallman has his essay The Right to Read. Hopefully it will reach a larger audience on dead trees than in electronic form.
Leonard Foner has an essay covering the basics of the cryptography debate. It's geared to get newcomers up to speed and should do that adequately.
Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer have a couple of essays about Habitat, a very early MUD sponsored by Lucasfilm. The essays have been published online; here's one of them and there's been plenty written about Habitat if you look. Excellent reading, brings out the challenges faced by any online community and simultaneously reminds you of the "good" old days (who here is paying by the hour for internet access today?).
And finally we come to True Names itself. Should be required reading in high school, IMHO. I won't discuss it much, either you've read it or you haven't, and if you haven't I'd rather you learn about it by reading it. If you don't want to buy the book, there are unauthorized electronic versions of the text floating around, but one way or another, read it, it's worth your time.
I'm going to go back now to Vinge's introduction. It bears quoting:
"It seems to me that it's still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt freedom--but this is one place where the most extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the "Four Horsemen" that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the "Terrorist Horseman" is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It's not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described." -- Vernor Vinge, August 1999
Today the "Terrorist Horseman" is in full charge, whipping us toward ever-tighter controls. And Vinge's prediction is embodied in the countless initiatives to install Digital Rights Management and government surveillance in every computing device. And that is why, in the end, I gave the anthology less than a 10/10 rating. Although I know it was written before the most recent events which proved it so accurate, it feels dated, as if we've already run at top speed down the road to a Net filled with surveillance, where the government and the MPAA know everyone's True Name, and yet Vinge is behind the times in predicting it now.
You can purchase True Names at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.
We all know him well, I especially liked his first books Stranger in a strange land and Slaughterhouse VI.
It is especially good to see authors like these to continue doing such a fine job. Keep up the good work!
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
but if Stallman's "Right to Read" is indicative of the quality of essays in this book, the book will do quite poorly.
"Right to Read" is as preachy as a Sunday morning Baptist sermon with about as much substance and grounding in reality.
The other topics discussed in the book (as brought up by Michael) are interesting but are also standard fare in any of the more interesting threads here on Slashdot.
I'm going to go back now to Vinge's introduction. It bars quoting:
[Long quotation of copyrighted materials snipped]
Hmmm....
tr.v. barred, barring, bars
To fasten securely with a long, straight, rigid piece of material.
To shut in or out with or as if with bars.
To obstruct or impede; block.
To keep out; exclude. See Synonyms at hinder1.
To rule out; except.
To mark with stripes or bands.
Law. To stop (a claim or action) by objection.
Not quite, but you almost, almost said the exact opposite of what you intended. Anyway I had to look up the word to see what you might mean.
--
Yayayah, I know he meant to write BEARS. It's a joke guys. Making fun of Taco. (Or Michael, or Chrisd or whatever he's calling himself these days....) Get it? Ha Ha.
The best and most terrifying document about Artificial Intelligence that I have ever read is Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity.
Consequently when my independent-scholar Open Source AI project caused me to be interviewed about it by Nanomagazine, I made sure in my low-status interview to refer hero-worshippingly to on-high Vernor Vinge,whom I thank for lighting the path for all us AI geeks.
In the early decades of Artificial Intelligence, the notion was
put forward that there could not be a single "grandmother cell"
in the brain-mind to hold the concept of a person's grandmother.
Somewhere there had to be knowledge of, say, Grandma Helen,
but it was preposterous to imagine that a single brain cell could
be the locus of that knowledge.
In diagrams of the Mentifex mind-model for AI, the
auditory memory channel contains words as phonemic strings, but
not the concepts named by the words. Instead, a word of language
when stored in the auditory memory channel serves as a coded key
for access to a concept residing in the abstract, semantic memory
channel that lies on the mind-grid, in parallel with the sensory
memory channels. Note that a phonemic word such as "d-o-g" often
will exist at thousands of chronologically separate spots in your
lifelong auditory memory channel, and that therefore a word such
as "dog" enjoys the reliability of massively parallel access to a
once again massively parallel fiber-gang of neuron fibers holding
your redundant and therefore conceptually perfect concept of "dog."
The "psi" memory array contains deep mindcore concepts which think by interacting.
The "En(glish) lexical array contains the fibers which control auditory engrams.
The syntax structure is also contained in the abstract memory channel, but
as program code at first, and hopefully as memory-switches in a more advanced AI.
-Shaft